Life-Long Obsessions: The Millions Interviews Claire Cameron

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The focus of Millions staffer Claire Cameron’s forthcoming novel is the poignant journey of a dwindling family of Neanderthals, diminished by hardship, nature, social taboos, and finally, Darwinian reality. The Last Neanderthal shines a mirror into our own humanity by featuring a family in peril, whose communication through rudimentary vocabulary is nevertheless sufficient to express the full range of human emotion. Meeting basic survival needs is more than a full-time job for these Neanderthals — not so different, then, from the vast majority of families in today’s world.

Against this spare background, an ambitious young scientist feverishly toils to untangle the story of Neanderthal remains recently discovered in a French cave. She works against the ticking clock of her advancing pregnancy and the shifting power dynamics in her professional field. The time period in which she lives may be infinitely more complex than that of the Neanderthals, yet we are clearly meant to find parallels between her challenges and the subjects of her research.

Why and how did Cameron land on this topic? What are we to take away from The Last Neanderthal? The author’s insights into how she mined this subject will enhance the reading experience of this unusual book.

The Millions: The Last Neanderthal is a book with a very unusual premise — the end of the Neanderthals. How did you come up with it?

CC: I have life-long obsessions, like many people do, but I didn’t realize the consistency of my obsessions until I started keeping notebooks. The ideas in my notebooks are often visual; there is a lot of cutting and pasting involved. A page doesn’t make any sense and I often can’t articulate why I’m collecting certain things.

Pictured is an example of a page where I combined marks possibly made by Neanderthals in Gorham’s Cave in Gibraltar with desert sand, feminism, and a domestic looking Will Oldham with a dog and a Volvo. All the big themes of my novel are there, though I didn’t know it at the time.

Evidence of Neanderthals in my notebooks traces way back, but my notes got more pointed in 2010 when a team of scientists found out that many modern humans carry genes from Neanderthals. People of European and Asian descent have between 1 percent to 4 percent Neanderthal DNA. This is a sign of interbreeding between modern humans and Neanderthals, something that had only been in the realm of speculation before then (though to be fair, the people who write Neanderthal porn on the Internet already knew). That was the premise that intrigued me, how did the two groups make contact?

TM: How did you research/learn about the Neanderthals?

CC: A recent wave of research has helped to revise the scientific view of Neanderthals. Much of it, including the Neanderthal genome, shows they were more like us than we previously imagined. I wanted to write characters inspired by this research. I did a lot of study on my own, but the most important step I took was to work with John Shea, an archaeologist and paleoanthropologist at Stony Brook University in New York.

When I first talked to Dr. Shea, he told me about reading an older Neanderthal novel. As a scientist, the story frustrated him so much that he tossed the book over his shoulder, scoring an accidental perfect hit into the wastebasket. We agreed that he would look for wastebasket moments in my work.

There were many wastebasket moments but his notes gave me a framework. I started to think of the science like a creative constraint. When I read convincing research, I used it as a rule that I had to work within.

TM: Although highly emotional, the Neanderthals’ story is told within a limited vocabulary, starting with their names — ‘Girl,’ ‘Him,’ etc. — presumably reflective of their brain capacity. Is this how you think of it, and can you tell us about how this kind of simplicity affected your writing process?

CC: WhenDavid Mitchell talked about writing in the future or past, he said he looks for what a character might take for granted. I want to see through the eyes of the main character. I develop a set of beliefs for her and, as part of that, imagine what she takes for granted. That is how I get immersed to the point where the story dominates my work—the character becomes big enough to crowd out the writer.

One of the things I decided is that my Neanderthals didn’t believe in talking all the time. They lived in a small family group and had intimate knowledge of each other. Every thought didn’t need to be said out loud. In fact, if they could hear me now, they might think I was a crowthroat — the crow being the worst offender when it comes to constant, mindless squawking. Also, I speculated that this was part of their culture because talking took more effort in the physical sense, they had to force out each word. So the cost of each word was considered carefully before it was spoken.

Once I shut up in my mind — or taking more silence for granted — I could hear all the thoughts I have that I don’t articulate. If you want to move a chair to a different part of the room, as one example, you do a silent calculation. It would be difficult to put into words what you are thinking. And if you practice keeping your trap shut, your senses wake up. You start to notice new things, like a bird that often calls when I step outside. I imagine she is an early warning system to let the other critters know, maybe, “Hey everybody, the squawking long pig is on the move!” So, I don’t see the Neanderthal language as a reflection of a simpler thought process, but as a sign of a different kind of strength.

TM: There is a leopard that seems to have a similar level of cognition to the Neanderthals in the book. Can you talk about that?

CC: My story is told through the eyes of a Neanderthal. We see the world much as she does. One of the things she believes is that there is little distinction between herself and the land around her. There is a glossary of Neanderthal words at the beginning of the book. One of the words, deadwood, expresses this idea.

Deadwood: A body on the other side of the dirt; used as an equivalent to our idea of death, though it expressed a change of state rather than a permanent end.

I developed the glossary as way to get inside the head of this particular Neanderthal, another attempt to uncover what she took for granted. If she saw herself on a continuum with other animals, rather than distinct or special in some way, it followed that she didn’t see much of a physical difference between her body and the land. She might also blur her mental identity. If she is interested in hunting or tracking, she assumes that another animal thinks in much the same way.

TM: Nature plays a critical role in your fiction. Your last novel, The Bear, opens with a tragedy at a campsite — two parents killed by a bear — and their two young children left to fend for themselves in the wilderness. We are outdoors for most of The Last Neanderthal as well. How do you think of the role of nature affects your storytelling?

CC: I often write about the place I am not. I lived in London, U.K., for about eight years and one day I got out of the tube at Oxford Circus. It was busy and as I tried to exit, I got stuck in a human traffic jam. There were too many people squished into an underground corridor. It became a gridlock of hot bodies pressed against each other. My inner Canadian quietly panicked, but this was London. Everyone remained calm and reserved. A message passed along the corridor until enough people backed out at one end and there was room to move again. Shortly after I started to write my first novel, The Line Painter. It was about Canada and specifically the vast, empty-of-people north of Ontario. I wrote out of a longing to be there, like it might be the antidote to being stuck in a human traffic jam.

If I write from that place, of longing, then the place I am writing about becomes like an obsession. I feel intense homesickness and idealize it in the same way. The place is mine and I can imagine it as an intense version of itself. That also means that I use the setting to serve the story and forget any urge to create a faithful portrait.

Right now I live in an urban neighborhood in downtown Toronto. I miss the access to Europe that I used to have from my London base. I miss the mountains. Though I get outside as much as I can, the life that I used to live, the one where I spent months in the wilderness, now resides most predominantly in my imagination. That’s why I write about it.

TM: In each of these novels, you are making keen observations about parents, even if they are absent. Can you comment on that?

CC: I love what Alexander Chee said, “you write to describe something you learn from your life but that is not described by describing your life.” My father died when I was young. I struggled with grief for many years. First I was locked in and couldn’t talk about it and after a while I got angry. I went through all the steps, but as I did, I held fast to the idea that I would eventually get over it. That’s how we talk about grief, that it is something to overcome.

I was surprised to find that when I had kids, I went through a stage of grief again. This time I grieved for my dad. I understood what it must have been like to know you are dying and to leave small children behind.

Grief doesn’t go away, it’s something you live with. And hopefully it becomes something that makes you stronger. I suppose that’s why it keeps coming up in my work, because I’m trying to figure it out.

TM: The stark vocabulary of the Neanderthals is especially marked in contrast to the parts of the novel that takes place in the present when we are in the company of archeologist Rosamund Gale, or Rose. What role does Rose play in the narrative, including her impending motherhood and her professional struggles?

CC: In 1921, H.G. Wells wrote a short story about Neanderthals called, “The Grisly Folk.” He described them this way, “a repulsive strangeness in his appearance…his beetle brows, his ape neck, and his inferior stature.” This was very much the thinking of his day, that a Neanderthal was like the archetype for an ogre. Since then our view of them has evolved, but we’ve really used them as a foil to ask questions about ourselves: What makes humans special? Asking questions in a self-centered way hasn’t given us much insight into them.

I wanted to focus on Neanderthals. In some ways, Rose is a foil for the main Neanderthal character, Girl. While Rose’s experience are important, she is also a way to gain insight into what a Neanderthal might have been like. Girl is the star of the show.

TM: Given today’s sense of — or lack of sense of — community, is there a message embedded in the relationships between and among members of “the Family” of last Neanderthals, and similarly, among the characters who live in the present time?

CC: I think of a novel as a question that takes the length of a book to ask. I was not searching for a message so much as thinking through the implications of how our modern family structure works.

I got interested in this question when my neighbor, a private, quiet person, told me about growing up in Newfoundland without central heat. He slept piled in a bed with his brothers, the youngest a bed wetter. My neighbor remembers getting up in the morning with a wet leg. When he stood, his pajamas would freeze and crackle. As he is so private I assumed this must have driven him mad, but when I asked he looked at me like I was crazy. Without his brother’s body heat to keep him warm, it was his body that would have frozen.

So I started thinking about that, what if we thought about family like that — the people who literally keep you alive? Grocery stores, electric lights, and central heat change how we think of our physical needs. Do they also change how we think about families? And what do we need to survive, both physically and mentally, in modern life?

TM: Rose is a scientist who seems to have an instinct to “go it alone,” even though she is close to nine months pregnant. In that sense, she relates to her subject of study — Girl. How did your sense of female independence inform your development of these characters?

CC: Rose gets pregnant and assumes this is a fairly natural and ordinary thing to do. As baby starts to grow, the timeline for her project gets crunched. Her pregnancy gives her a sense of impending doom. When she becomes a mother she will be sidelined, whether by herself or by others, so she needs to get shit done.

There is a group of women scientists on Twitter, many with an interest in archeology, who are posting photos with the hashtag #pregnantinthefield. I love the photos because seeing the possibilities helps us all believe them. Polly Clark, author of Larchfield, wrote eloquently about this, “I wasn’t a reluctant mother at all. But I had no notion of being simply a vessel: I stubbornly continued to think that, as an individual, I still mattered.” The women in these photos matter.

But the other day I said a quiet apology to Rose for giving her a sense of urgency about her work — I know she is the kind of female character that might be criticized. I had to write about her though, specifically how her professional interests and personal ambition sits at odds with parenthood. This was my experience. This is the experience of so many parents.

TM: What can we learn from the Neanderthals in thinking about our own humanity?

CC: We can fall into the trap of thinking that the way we do things now is normal, but it’s important to look back for context. As the always quotable Winston Churchill said, “The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward.” We are Homo Sapiens, a self-obsessed people who like to tell stories. I’m really writing about modern humans, aren’t I? A novel becomes a way of looking at history to think through our inheritance.

TM: Do you have a new novel in process, and if so, can you tell us about it?

CC: My obsessions sometimes turn into novels and sometimes they don’t. Or sometimes they combine to become something I didn’t expect.

At the moment, I’m trying to understand the advances in physics, specifically how ideas about quantum gravity have completely changed our understanding of reality. I’m also comparing translations of Beowulf, what does the Irish poet Seamus Heaney do with an Old English poem, versus J.R.R. Tolkien’s handling of a similar passage? I can only hope that these two interests don’t combine.

Martha Anne Toll
’s essays and book reviews appear regularly in The Millions and on NPR’s website, and in Heck, [PANK], The Nervous Breakdown, Tin House blog, Bloom, Narrative, Cargo Literary, and Washington Independent Review of Books; her fiction in Catapult, Vol.1 Brooklyn, Yale’s Letters Journal, Slush Pile Magazine, Poetica E Magazine, Referential Magazine, and Inkapture Magazine. Her novel in progress is represented by the Einstein Literary Agency. She directs a social justice foundation focused on preventing and ending homelessness and on criminal justice reform. Please visit her at marthaannetoll.com; and tweet to her at @marthaannetoll.

"Ninety-nine percent of people, and probably a higher percentage of readers, have it in, in general, for characters like this, and feel when they read about people like this, 'Oh, I know how I feel about them, I know what they’re like.' So, I was very much interested in making them hard to pass judgment on, at least until the book was shut, and possibly past that."

In a 1992 interview with The Comics Journal, Daniel Clowes talked about the kinds of comics he wanted to draw when he was a teenager.
I remember at the time thinking what a bold concept it would be to just do comics about real people and real life, and that was a real crazy idea at that time. I remember thinking EC was the closest thing to that. Like the Shock SuspenStories, ‘cause it had stories just about people wearing suits, you know; they weren’t in costumes.“Suits not costumes” is a low bar for realism, but it laid the basis for Clowes’s own form of grotesquerie. At the time of the interview, Clowes was three years into writing Eightball. The comic serialized his graphic novels Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron and Ghost World and was interspersed with short pieces exercising various registers of tragicomedy. He drew a cruel portrait of Dan Pussey, the pathetic creator of superhero comics. He was far gentler with Enid Coleslaw and Rebecca Doppelmeyer, the grim teenage comic geniuses at the center of Ghost World. I don’t think there has been a fictional character with a better name than Needledick the Bug-Fucker, nor a character who revealed so many multitudes within a single page.

Fantagraphics has just released a handsome two-volume edition of the first 18 issues of Eightball, published between 1989 and 1997. (Later issues were re-released as single-edition graphic novels, David Boring, Ice Haven and The Death-Ray.) We met on April 18 at 9lb Hammer, a bar in Seattle’s Georgetown neighborhood, around the corner from Fantagraphics Books where he was due for a signing. The following is a pared-down version of a 30-minute conversation.

The Millions: It’s clear that Dan Pussey was definitely not someone who read Eightball, but Enid from Ghost World could have [even if she didn’t]. I’m not sure if that distinction is so clear 25 years later.

Daniel Clowes: Probably not, no. Actually I think she and Dan Pussey have merged into one person, the modern reader of comics.

TM: The modern reader of comics has a stack of Spider-Man comics and a stack of Eightball.

DC: There doesn’t seem to be any discernment between types of comics. People who like comics like all comics.

TM: I really enjoy the Dan Pussey comics. But they make me so uncomfortable, because they are filled with so much meanness.

DC: I was so angry. When I first started I was trying to work in this non-existent world of comics that I wanted there to be and didn’t actually exist, which was some version of underground comics. And there were magazines like Raw and Weirdo that were kind of post-underground, [but] there wasn’t that much of that. You couldn’t go into a comic-book store and have this range of stuff the way you can now. And I was stuck in this world that I didn’t feel I belonged to. And then I felt like I was being belittled whenever I went to a comic convention or something. “Oh you do those kinds of comics.” It was sort of like what we did was unofficial. You had to do real comics. You had to do superheroes for big publishers and stuff like that.

TM: So you were angry at mainstream comics culture.

DC: And I was angry…As a young man I could have been Dan Pussey very easily. That was how I got into comics. I was into Marvel Comics like everybody else then. It’s that kind of thing where you move beyond that and then you have an antagonism towards your earlier self. It’s usually expressed in an antagonism towards what you liked at that age.

TM: I like them because he sympathizes with these abject figures, the current generation of Dan Pusseys.

DC: At the time, I saw myself as socially inferior to Dan Pussey. I was fighting the power at the time, and now I look back and it’s completely the opposite. It seems like I’m making fun of this sad outsider who has absolutely no social bearing in society. At the time, it didn’t feel that way at all. It felt like these are the guys who are keeping me from existing in this world I want to exist in.

TM: Why do you think the comics cultures of Marvel and Fantagraphics merged in terms of their readers?

DC: I couldn’t tell you. It’s a mystery to me. I don’t see any correlation between all the different types of comics. The aesthetic gulf between the kind of stuff I’m interested in and the kind of stuff that is mainstream is so vast that I can’t wrap my head around it. To me, it’s like if you were into two completely different types of music, like if you were into Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs and Mozart.

TM: Which is possible.

DC: It’s totally possible, but the fact that that’s not an isolated weirdo, that it’s everybody…I find very strange.

TM: Well, so much of comics are really about bodies. Superhero comics are about these idealized bodies and the comics that you do are so much about the deformities of bodies.

DC: I would say the reality of bodies.

TM: It’s possible to switch between those interests.

DC: I suppose so, but that’s reading it on a level that is so beyond aesthetic discernment where it’s all about the underlying content of it. I find there’s no qualitative judgment at all.

TM: Your work doesn’t offer any nobility to outsider-ness, no heroism.

DC: No, not heroism. I admire those who are stuck on the outside and have to grapple with that and are really unable to conquer that in themselves. They have some quality that doesn’t enable them to make the leap to the social norm. And I’m interested in characters like that. Heroism, I don’t think so.

TM: You are interested in the idea of a character who is given a condition he has to deal with and chooses to keep existing rather than commit suicide.

DC: Yeah, I find that admirable. I think that’s endlessly dramatic. To me, that’s the most entertaining character, someone who is fighting with himself, who endlessly regenerates the story. A character like Wilson I did a few years ago. I can sit down and think of anything at all. A saltshaker. How would Wilson respond to a saltshaker? And I know in my head I can write a strip in 15 minutes of what he would think: “The salt shaker is the worst designed thing I’ve ever seen.” He’s a perfect example of a character who is unable to be what he wants to be and is unable to cure himself. And I find that endlessly entertaining.

TM: Thanks to the Internet, the notion of freakishness is very different now than it was when you were writing Eightball.

DC: Totally.

TM: Needledick the Bug-Fucker can now go into a chatroom and find people from all over the world who are into the same thing he’s into.

DC: That’s true. I always think to myself, [what would have happened] if I had chatrooms and the Internet when I was 15? Instead of having no way to communicate with anybody, having all this pent-up emotion inside me that I tried to get out by drawing comics, spen[ding] every day of my adolescence really trying to hone that craft so that I could somehow talk to the world…I wonder if instead I would have just gone on some message board and said, “I’m so sad. You too?”

TM: If you could have Googled “I like to fuck small insects” and got back all that information from everyone who did want to fuck small insects, could you imagine writing that story?

DC: No. No. I loved the idea of the world back then. If you had some kind of bizarre fetish like that, it was so hard to meet people who had that same thing. I had a friend, a guy who ran Feral House. He would always find these newsletters about these weird fetishes. These guys were typing up these newsletters and sending them to the three other people they met through this fetish magazine. That’s your whole world, waiting for the new package by guys who are into being stepped on by a woman in high heels. Now you can find everyone in the world who is into that within 15 minutes. I loved that underground.

TM: And that reflects the way Eightball circulated. I read Eightball because of two friends. I’m probably in the last generation of people who would have read it because of word of mouth and not because I looked it up on the Internet. The letters page in Eightball really reflects that fact.

DC: It was absolutely that. That was why I felt the duty to take the letters page seriously. When people wrote to me, I wrote back to every single person back then, because I felt it was my responsibility to be the steward of this little world. And I felt that everyone writing to me and reading me had something in common. They were part of some kind of tribe. And I would send [my readers other] people’s addresses. “You should look this guy up.” The minute I got email I stopped responding to anybody. It just felt like you don’t need me anymore. Eliminate the middleman.

TM: Are there any particular letters that gave you pause?

DC: It’s funny because I saved every single letter I ever got, unless it was some one-sentence, “send me a free comic.” I had file boxes filled with letters. I was doing this monograph a few years ago. And I thought, let’s look through these letters and see if there’s anything interesting. I couldn’t believe it. I just remember nice heartfelt letters. Some of them were 20, 30 pages long, from people writing back numerous times. They put in the kind of effort and energy nobody would do now, [because then] they [had] nobody else to talk to. And I always felt I had to write back with something substantial. It was an amazing outpouring, because I was just this anonymous guy on a certain level, who they felt, “He understands me.”

TM: Did anything from those letters end up in your comics outside the letters page?

DC: Not in specific ways that I remember, but the tone of them absolutely. I felt like I wrote characters based on the voice of some of those letters. I felt like I really knew what somebody talking straight from his id at you felt like.

TM: You once described Eightball as a one-man Mad.

DC: That was the goal, to have a one-man variety magazine.

TM: So you were working with a lot of different voices. How was that different from what was going on at the time?

DC:Robert Crumb was always drawing in an underground comic style. He was always drawing like Robert Crumb. He experimented with different styles, but anyone could spot him a mile away. I was trying to bring in different tones and looks. I wanted some of it to look film-noirish and black-and-white stuff. And some of it was old, 1920s cartoons. I wanted it to be much more over the map. I wanted to see how far you could go with this material and still have all of it make sense.

TM: You didn’t want anyone to be able to identify you.

DC: At the time I wanted to have this completely anonymous style. I wanted it to look like if you had a computer printout of comics where it was totally uninflected with any kind of stylistic stuff unless I wanted it to look in a certain stylistic way. So Velvet Glove was almost photographic in the way I imagined it and now I look back and it looks so intensely stylized. But I think that’s what you’re hoping for in a style, not something you are pitching or trying to make happen.

TM: Why did you want it to be so anonymous?

DC: I wanted to draw the world as I was seeing it in my head. I didn’t want it to be, “Oh, I can draw this kind of thing in this way.” I wanted it to be diagrams of what it looked like in my brain, to filter all that out.

TM: Is that still how you approach your work?

DC: No, it’s much more intuitive. I don’t have to struggle as much, so I feel like I can get into it much more deeply. Back then, I felt like I was just trying to get the basics right, really learning what I was doing. Now I feel like I can do everything without erasing and redoing it.

TM: Maybe it’s because you did the poster for Happiness, but I always thought you had more in common with Todd Solondz than you did with Terry Zwigoff, even though you did two movies with Zwigoff [Ghost World and Art School Confidential].

DC: It’s true. I always wanted to do a movie poster. I always liked the Mad guys who used to do movie posters. I would have done any movie poster. I don’t care about the movie. It could have been an Adam Sandler movie. And I was a huge fan of Welcome to the Dollhouse and to be asked to do his second film…[Solondz] and I have talked and we have a very similar goal. At least my early comics were like [his movies.]

TM: Dan Pussey could easily have found his way into Happiness.

DC: That was the first time I saw Philip Seymour Hoffman. And he was the Dan Pussey I’d been waiting for my whole life. [Happiness] was an ensemble piece, so no one was supposed to be the star on the poster and I said, no, that doesn’t work. I wanted to make Philip Seymour Hoffman the star of the movie. So I made him the focus of the movie and then he was referred to as the star of that movie, which he wasn’t. I always felt like he owed me.

TM: Philip Seymour Hoffman looks like a Dan Clowes character.

DC: When he died, I was crushed because I was 100 percent sure that he would one day play one of my characters. It just felt like one of those paths that had to happen and I just couldn’t take it.

TM: I would like to ask you a couple more questions and if you can’t answer them it’s fine. But Shia LaBeouf…

DC: Oh, I’m allowed to talk about that. I did not sign any non-disclosure agreements. [Shia LaBeouf plagiarized Clowes’s 2007 strip Justin M. Damiano for his short film HowardCantour.com.]

TM: One of the things that interested me in that plagiarism case is not just that he plagiarized your dialogue but that he plagiarized your shots.

DC: Quite a bit of it, it seems. It was close.

TM: The question of plagiarizing shots from one medium to another is a legitimate question, but it still looks like a gray area.

DC: Absolutely. But it was such an egregious case of plagiarism that I didn’t have to get into those nuances. The shots weren’t even so relevant, after the story, basically every line of dialogue and the characters [were plagiarized]. He didn’t even claim that he didn’t use the story.

TM: His behavior came across as so fucked up. Did you think of using him as a character in your work?

DC: No, he’s too specific. I don’t have any interest in getting into any of that at all. But the experience from my end was a very interesting experience and I could definitely see that making it’s way into something.

TM: What made it so interesting?

DC: Just to be a part of such an absurd little thing. I was just getting 10 phone messages from CNN and TMZ a day. People were like, “Could you get to the studio by 4 am?” Everybody was assuming I wanted to be a part of that. And I didn’t want to be a part of that. And I didn’t want to know his name or to have this inflicted on me. [It] was so not funny to me. But if it had been any of my friends I thought it would have been one of the funniest things in the world, to watch one of my fellow artists squirm. I just didn’t want it to be me.

One comment:

Fascinating and illuminating. Loved getting a peek into the notebook and wish there was more! I for one hope there *is* a connection between quantum physics and Beowulf. Loved her article over at LitHub about Jane Smiley as well.

While plugging away at a novel in some dark corner or café table, a writer can only hope and trust that following the energy of obsession will lead the narrative to a vital destination. And yet when the novel’s timing and focus coincide with significant events on the nation’s stage, there’s also some serendipity involved. And so it goes with Nicholas Mennuti, whose fiction has long been preoccupied with the new forms of Internet surveillance. Mennuti’s story “Connected,” which was published in Agni in 2008, told the story of an intelligence agent who becomes obsessed with the subject he’s monitoring. This summer Mennuti’s first novel, Weaponized, written in collaboration with screenwriter David Guggenheim, proved to be all too prescient in its imagining of government surveillance systems in place. In the novel, Kyle West, a government contractor and genius programmer, hides out in Cambodia after he’s outed as the mastermind who devised the U.S.’s secret surveillance program software. At the time of Weaponized’s publication, Edward Snowden had just released classified documents revealing the extent of PRISM and other U.S. Internet surveillance programs and was still holed up at the Moscow airport seeking asylum. And regardless of chance, it seems that in this case Mennuti had his finger on the pulse of the techno-zeitgeist.

Weaponized, too, has its own pulse and inner rhythm: this thriller pulled me in and kept me turning pages with its quick pacing and intelligence. Mennuti and I corresponded during the summer months about the Snowden scandal and just what makes him weary regarding Internet surveillance and personal privacy, the burdens and pleasures of writing genre (vs. literary) fiction, and what he’s learned from masters like John le Carré and Graham Greene, as well as the perpetual issues of exile, identity, public versus private, plotting, and pacing that inform his writing.

The Millions: Surveillance and, specifically, surveillance states figure prominently in your fiction. In your story “Connected” an intelligence agent becomes obsessed with the woman he’s monitoring, and now in your novel, Weaponized, the programmer Kyle West has created advanced surveillance software that the U.S. government uses to spy on its citizens. Can you talk more about your interest in surveillance and how (as we’ve recently discovered) events in your novel parallel the government’s existing surveillance programs, specifically with regard to Edward Snowden and the US PRISM program?

But, and this is probably the bigger one, as writers, we really are essentially voyeurs, so commenting on surveillance culture allows me to sort of auto-critique my own psychopathology. I’m a voyeur who is writing about other voyeurs. Clearly, I find this far too comfortable, because I’ve mined the hell out of it for fiction, as you’ve noted.

I used it in “Connected” and now again in Weaponized, but I did switch around their relationships to the surveillance state, per se. In “Connected” my protagonist is inside the system. In Weaponized, he’s running from the system he helped create. Kyle’s scenario is slightly more ironic and certainly less tragic.

Regarding PRISM and now XKeyscore and all the other code words that Snowden has revealed — it didn’t take Cassandra to see that one coming. Our government never stops using a program if it’s working for them, no matter what the outrage. All they do is take it further underground and go off the books.

That’s what I posited in Weaponized, after the whole Bush uproar that we would further privatize wiretapping and rely less on the NSA, which has partially happened (Snowden worked for Booz Allen after all). What’s going to happen next is further automation and less relying on humans to monitor all of this, and that’s what Weaponized was kind of getting at. Eventually, the machines will watch us. Because machines can’t defect to Russia.

I don’t think I have an overriding interest in Internet security/surveillance; I just think it’s the new telephone. It’s the new bug on your car’s dashboard. If you write tech thrillers, you have to use the tools of the trade, and the Internet was a gift to all of us.

And of course, I’m going back into surveillance again. My new book is all about East Berlin in the ’80s. So I’m pre-Internet this time.

In fact, I’m beginning to worry that surveillance for me is what psychiatry and discipline were for Foucault. The themes that dog your career no matter how hard you run. Although, I’m not sure how hard I’m running — or that Foucault did, for that matter — it’s just that this societal shift really got under my skin that I can’t shake.

TM: You have a mixed background of training as a screenwriting, as a fiction writer with high literary aspirations, and now as a thriller novelist — who just sold the film rights. Would you talk more about the difference between writing genre fiction and literary fiction as well as the commonalities that you perceive? I recall you once said your genre fiction has a literary sheen. Please divulge.

NM: Did I say my genre fiction has a literary sheen? I can sure be pretentious! And thanks for exposing The Millions world to it.

TM:, Is that really pretentious? I didn’t think so. I thought you were attempting to describe your authorial intentions. Honestly, I would prefer to read genre fiction with literary ambitions than genre fiction with a demotic sheen.

NM: I’m kidding. I actually think genre fiction could use a little more pretentiousness at times. I think the difference between genre fiction and literary fiction varies for a lot of people, but I’ll try and give you my own definition.

Genre fiction frequently relies on well-mined archetypes both on a character and narrative level. Even the best genre fiction is mining the same tropes. Guys like John le Carré and Graham Greene, even at their most trenchant and deconstructive, retain certain genre tropes. One man against the system. Usually a romance with someone from the other side. And narrative momentum really is the essential thing in genre.

In literary fiction the archetypes still exist, but you have more to choose from and they’re far more malleable. Plus, people are willing to tolerate more experimentation and purplish prose in literary fiction (and I mean “purplish” in the best way possible). Genre fiction is meant to be very accessible and sort of shorn of linguistic personality. Even at its best, the prose is supposed to be very workmanlike. The author is supposed to disappear in service of the story.

And that’s where I sometimes get into trouble and where I think my “literary sheen” comes into play. I have trouble staying the hell out of my work. I’m all over the place. I’m not deliberately trying to alienate the reader, but I think both my genre and my literary fiction aren’t designed to lack personality. And this is way, way more of a problem in genre fiction.

TM: Your shelves are filled with books of serious philosophy, European history, literary fiction — for example, the contents of just one stack include Aristotle’sPoetics, Bataille’sVisions of Excess, Highsmith’s Ripley novels, Graham Greene’sThe Ministry of Fear, Fritz Lang’sInterviews, Littell’sThe Kindly Ones, Genet’sQuerelle, Blanchot’sThe Space of Literature, Martin Amis’sHouse of Meetings, and Peter Gay’sFreud: A Life for Our Times. Even in this fast-paced thriller you’ve dropped in ideas from Cioran and Freud, among others. And you’re probably even better versed in film than you are in literature. Could you talk about the books and films that have most influenced your own writing, and specifically what you channeled for Weaponized?

NM: I’m kind of a sponge. I just look for what fascinates or inspires me, and there’s no plan. There’s no strategy to my reading or my watching. That said, once I decide what I’m going to work on, my reading and watching become very focused. They have to — otherwise I’d never start working. I’d just keep going through the shelves.

Cioran and Freud both spent significant time as exiles, so that was important to me for Kyle in Weaponized. I wanted to draw upon the literature of the exile. So you end up with Highsmith, Conrad, Greene, Hemingway,Duras, and that ilk. They’re all part of the literary DNA of Weaponized.

For movies, I really studied Michael Mann and Hitchcock very closely. Mann in particular because he knows how to use landscapes and architecture to express psychological states — and that was key for me in Weaponized. I wanted you to experience the state of being an exile in Cambodia in a subjective way. Mann and Hitchcock really are the kings of subjective cinema and to be more specific—subjective thriller cinema, which obviously Weaponized owes a great deal to.

When I’m not in depth on a particular project my reading is all over the place, but it’s usually going to contain some liberal dose of J. G.Ballard, ThomasPynchon, Robert Stone, Michel Houellebecq, Martin Amis, Alan Glynn, William Gibson, Thomas Mann. And then I do like cultural theory, science, and politics a great deal. I’m also an avid consumer of what Ballard called “invisible literature” (internal documents from corporations and PR firms, filled with awe-inspiring statistics and data-analysis) and the Internet is really a great place for that. I spend far too much time every day searching out esoteric ramblings and numbers online.

TM: I’m interested in the idea of identity and the disintegration of the public / private dichotomy, with regard to your novel. In Weaponized, it’s evoked with the surveillance program that Kyle West creates. However, despite having developed the U.S. government’s surveillance software, West shuns revealing personal information about himself. He hates appearing on the television news and having information about his personal life disclosed publicly. His foil, Julian Robinson, seems quite the opposite, charming and comfortable in his own skin despite his chameleon-like ability to transform his identity. And of course, the two end up trading identities. Could you talk more about this paradox in relation to the book, and what identity means now, and what it will become?

NM: Identity is a huge concern for me because it really is the common human denominator. No matter what advances we make in technology, it’s going to stay the same. Humans crave recognition. And we construct ourselves through the eyes of others. We become who we are by how people see us, recognize us. So no matter how diffuse we get socially — we’re still going crave this. What I think we’re seeing now is people negotiating the new boundaries of recognition and some really kamikaze it.

I sometimes think the amount of social media is really just a sign of how desperate for interpersonal recognition we really are. And it’s become a sort of cultural blackmail. If you want recognition, you have to use it. I’m not even sure if exhibitionism as a psychological trait really exists anymore. I think we’re all exhibitionists now whether we want to be or not. I mean people are posting amateur porn and their deepest thoughts and anxieties on a 24/7 basis with no let-up. But it’s not exhibitionism, really, and it’s not over-sharing. It’s just trying to construct a self in the new digital era. It’s a constant process of negotiation and whatever application allows you to best construct a self survives. It really is like Darwinism in that sense. Poor MySpace.

I think one of the reasons literature has been having so much trouble is that maybe we need new words. We have new numbers to express the new world. We have quantum numbers. No one can understand them except a few, but we have those numbers. But do we have those words yet? Can we get them? And maybe the new literature will have to be a formal creation instead of a lexical one. I don’t know.

Robinson is uniquely qualified to live in a quantified world because his identity is fluid. He’s able to adapt to whatever the form requires. Kyle has adapted technologically — well, he’s done better than that — but he’s still living in the 20th century in regard to identity, to the sovereign self. He’s fixed. He’s rooted. And of course that’s probably how he ended up on the run in the first place.

To be honest, I’m way more Kyle than Robinson in those terms. I’m not ready to surrender my identity to a bunch of pixels.

TM: You’ve said elsewhere that with Kyle West you inadvertently created a pseudo-doppelganger for Edward Snowden, as both are seeking to escape the consequences of their actions with regard to their government’s surveillance system. The greatest difference is the offence — Snowden merely leaked the information about the secret surveillance programs to the public while West created the software that made this kind of government surveillance possible. It seems that you were rather prescient in this respect, so I’ll ask, what do you think is most important to keep in mind both with regard to the Snowden case and the government’s ability and willingness to eavesdrop on every part of our lives?

NM: The first thing to remember is that the government has never, ever respected your privacy. At least not since post-WWI and the Communist threat in America. They’ve been opening your mail for years. They’ve been wire-tapping without warrants for years. The only difference is that it’s easier now.

The Internet was created as a doomsday device for Continuance of Government. It has always had a military function, just like the highway system in the U.S. The Internet may seem like the Wild West, but I don’t think it’s ever been as free as people would like to think.

I think we’re going to see more and more Snowdens and Mannings because the government classifies SO MUCH these days. You’re a leaker if you divulge classified information — well, what do you do when most things are classified? Manning just did a data dump on WikiLeaks. Half that stuff should never have been classified. Some of it deserved classification, but a lot didn’t. So I think the culture of leaking has been facilitated by a government that’s more and more reliant on classifying everything in its path to punish people.

I chose to make Kyle the victim of a leak as opposed to the leaker because as a writer I found that more provocative. How do you get people to feel for that guy? As you’re well aware, I love ambiguity in my characters and to me Kyle is more ambiguous than Snowden. I can make a case for Snowden. It’s harder to make one for Kyle and that excites me as a writer.

TM: The question of a disregard for ethics is central to the narrative, too. Kyle West and Julian Robinson and Andrei Protosevitch are all powerful men who do what they do because they can. Protosevitch says that he’s ruthless because no one has ever stopped him. The same applies to Robinson and West — they readily remove themselves from the ethical equation and personal responsibility in the ways they pursue power. West is perhaps more self-aware and conscious of an ethical imperative than Robinson — it seems to be both his downfall and his redemption. Do you see a need for a stronger ethics of accountability? Or is it a lost cause at this point?

NM: I certainly see myself — as clichéd as this sounds — as an ethical writer. I hope that ethical accountability isn’t a lost cause, although it depends on what day of the week you ask me.

In my opinion, the problem is that the people who need to be held accountable — we know who they are, thank you — are not. And that is a habitual matter of process. So if the people we expect to be held accountable escape responsibility, then what are all of us regular folks supposed to think? And I’m not just talking about our government. I’m talking about religion. I’m talking about finance, the law, all of it. All of the purported moral barometers have proven to be naked underneath and we can’t find a reason to be good — for lack of a better word.

At the same time, we’ve never been more self-entitled, and I don’t blame us entirely. We’ve had it drummed into our heads that we have to happy. We are almost demanded to be happy unless. And we are largely not. And I think people began to assume that leading an unethical life may provide a shortcut to at least short-term fulfillment. It’s working for our leaders. It’s a vicious cycle. We’re desperate to be happy and no one is giving us any guidance as how to behave.

I agree though. Kyle, at bottom, is an ethical human being. Flawed, but trying. And I choose to think that’s how most of us really are.

TM: I thought I’d introduce something Evgeny Morozovwrote into the equation. He argues: “NSA surveillance, Big Brother, Prism: all of this is important stuff. But it’s as important to focus on the bigger picture — and in that bigger picture, what must be subjected to scrutiny is information consumerism itself — and not just the parts of the military-industrial complex responsible for surveillance. As long as we have no good explanation as to why a piece of data shouldn’t be on the market, we should forget about protecting it from the NSA, for, even with tighter regulation, intelligence agencies would simply buy—on the open market — what today they secretly get from programs like Prism.” Morozov also states that ethics is removed from the equation — that market forces have replaced morality.

What is your response to this, with regard to the previous question on ethics, and also his argument that information consumerism is a greater danger than government surveillance programs?

NM: I both agree and disagree with his diagnosis. You cannot separate the military-industrial complex, surveillance, and capitalism. Because the thing is that surveillance is the newest notch on the military-industrial complex. The twilight is coming on traditional means of warfare. Unless something utterly catastrophic happens, I just can’t see another ground invasion occurring.

The military-industrial complex is tremendously adaptable. They can see the writing on the wall and they know that Systems Intelligence is going to replace traditional Human Intelligence and also standard means of warfare. It’s why the CIA has transformed itself from an intelligence gathering organization to an international hit squad. They are getting with the program. Systems Intelligence finds the target and the CIA whacks them.

That said, I think Morozov has a point in that information overload and market forces have rendered us basically morally agnostic.

Ironically, both our culture and the NSA — and this is something I tried to get at in Weaponized — have the same problem. We have lost our moral compasses because of filtering issues. We have too much de-contextualized data and no way to process and filter it all. You end up with everything being weighted equally. Which produces an utter vacuum.

So, although I agree with Morozov philosophically, I disagree with his separation of government surveillance from capitalism. And I think he knows you can’t, which is why he decided to put the burden on us. You can argue that point; you can’t really argue the other one.

TM: Plot, pacing, and structure are central to your fiction as well as to your conception of what makes good story. You could probably teach a semester-long class on this, but let’s say you have to compress the lesson down to a two minute craft talk on how these elements function within a story and how to approach them as a writer — what would you advise?

NM: I think those factors are what make a good genre story and also what makes a certain “type” of literary fiction story work. And if you can write like Amis or Nabokov you can get away with certain things that us lesser mortals cannot. We lesser mortals need to follow some rules.

My first rule is just to outline. Outline. And then do a little more outlining. I know some people feel that it kills the spontaneity, but I find it frees me up. If I know the story when I start in, I feel like I can really concentrate on the characters, the prose, the mood. If I know where I’m going, I can really play on the margins. And I actually love the margins more than the meat sometimes.

Plot, structure, and pacing are all interrelated. Plot is clearly the first thing and needs to be differentiated from story. Story is — what is this thing about? Plot is — how am I going to get there, to tell this story in individual beats. Structure is — the most effective means to do so, to maximize drama. And pacing ties into structure. You just need to make sure there’s room to breathe between the big story beats.

Really most writing just comes down to one thing: What is the most effective way to dole out the pertinent information for this particular scene or moment?

I can be obsessive about construction, but I secretly think it’s because I don’t like to rewrite. I like to rewrite prose and dialogue — but I HATE having to rebuild a story from the ground-up once I’m halfway through the book.

I’m not offering any of those tips as a panacea. I’ve just seen too many writers get 2/3 of the way into a book and realize that the plot is not working. And you lose a year trying to save what you love, while reshaping the whole thing. That’s my nightmare. And I’ve been there.

I’d like to present to you a semi-regular column: Books & Mortar! Which will look at the fabulous world of tucked-away independent bookstores, a pulsating nationwide constellation of literary delights that, heaven forbid, you might walk past without knowing it’s there.

For instance, Key West, the southernmost point in the U.S., is the home of Jimmy Buffett, tarpon fishing, turquoise waters (and drinks), spring breakers, pirate stories, great Cuban food, and crazy-beautiful sunsets. But it also has a storied literary history, with residents including Elizabeth Bishop, Ralph Ellison, Tennessee Williams, Richard Wilbur, John Williams. It’s where Wallace Stevens famously attempted to punch Ernest Hemingway at the Sloppy Joe’s bar, with mixed results. And more recent writers have called Key West home: Ann Beattie, Tom McGuane, Joy Williams (also, her book The Florida Keys: A History and Guideis one of the most masterful works of travel writing that you’ll ever want to read).

And now it has Books & Books Key West, a locally owned independent that opened in 2016 and is also (voluntarily—haha) nonprofit. This 1,200 square foot store is housed and affiliated with The Studios of Key West, an arts and cultural organization that, among other things, runs an artists’ residency. Books & Books Key West thus also carries a terrific selection of art supplies.

Oh, and one of the cofounders and owners is someone you may have heard of: Judy Blume.

The Millions: What was the genesis of this amazing store?

Judy Blume:George [Cooper, Blume’s husband] and I wanted a full service indie bookstore in Key West. When we came to town 20 years ago there were five bookstores. Four years ago we were down to one used store. We tried to get Mitchell Kaplan of Books & Books, the great Miami area bookseller, to open a store in Key West. He wanted to but ultimately he couldn’t make the numbers work. Rents in Key West are very high and we’re more than three hours by car from Miami. Finally, Mitch said, “If you and George can find a way to make it work I’ll be there for you.” George is on the board of The Studios of Key West, a non-profit arts center who had just renovated a beautiful art deco building in Old Town with a 1200 square foot corner storefront. The perfect place for a non-profit indie bookstore! We (George) convinced the board of the Studios it was worth a shot. Everything happened so fast it feels like a dream when I look back. We opened in February 2016. I laugh now at how little we knew about running a bookstore. We learned on the job. We’re affiliated with Mitch’s stores but we’re non-profit and financially independent. We call Mitch’s Coral Gable store our “Mothership.” They do our buying (though we can order or reject any books we want.) They set up our store with handsome refurbished fixtures from one of their stores. Their staff came down for two weeks to set us up with our initial order and to train our staff, including George and me (we have three paid employees now) and our volunteers. During “season” our volunteers are especially important to us. They are great readers. One knows poetry. One worked in a bookshop in London. I miss them terribly when they leave for their summer homes but we are so lucky to have our three hardworking, loyal, friendly, fun employees. Our first season, George and I worked seven days. This past season we were able to take two days off a week, and we’re thinking of working four days a week next season.

TM: Does your bookstore have a mascot? A bookstore cat?

JB: The idea of having a bookstore cat is appealing but because we’re on a busy corner we’re concerned about any animal—cat or dog—running out into the street. One day, when we first opened, a hen came into the store. Chickens are protected in Key West and roam freely around town. We stayed calm, though we were thinking, OMG, if that chicken gets scared and starts flying around she’s going to poop on our books! Lucky for us, she wandered around, then with some gentle urging, walked out the way she walked in. Maybe she was looking for a good book? We leave our door open in nice weather. Customers bring in their own dogs. We keep a water bowl outside and treats by the register. This works best when it’s one dog at a time. Usually they ask if it’s okay and usually we say yes (if it’s a nice dog). So far only one has peed on our floor and the customer, a tourist, walked out before we knew it. Good our floor is concrete.

TM: What’s the most surprising thing you have found about being a bookseller?

JB: How much there is to learn, how hard you work every day, not just with customers but in the back room. The number of boxes that arrive weekly is staggering. We see our UPS delivery guys almost every day. Receiving new books and returning others (I had to learn to be tough because, as a writer, I never want to return books) takes us a huge amount of time. One of our two managers is always on that. Then there’s keeping up with the dusting. Everyone is expected to dust. If we had a cat, I’d give her a cloth, too. The time flies by. I usually go home exhausted but very happy and can’t wait to go back again the next day.

TM: You and your husband George are co-founders. How do you divide up the duties?

JB: I’m on the floor, chatting with customers, helping them find the right books, even working the register (not my strong point but I’m very proud of what I’ve learned to do). Every day I “pet” the books, move them around, change the window displays. Tuesdays are “new book” days. That’s when I get to put out the books that are date-sensitive, which means moving around all the books on the new and notable table.

George is in the office most of the time. He’s our CFO, making sure it’s all going well. And so, far, fingers crossed, it’s been a success.

TM: Authors are beginning to open up bookstores all over the place: Louise Erdrich in Minneapolis, Ann Patchett in Nashville. Larry McMurtry is a long-time bookstore proprietor. Do you think you’re part of a trend?

JB: I didn’t know about all the authors opening bookstores when we started, but it’s good news!

TM: What’s a day in the life of Judy Blume, bookseller like?

JB: Rush, rush, rush—to get to the store. We’re open 10 to six, seven days a week. I ride my bike unless it’s rainy. Tuesdays and Thursdays I come directly from the gym. When we opened the store, we thought our customers would be 75 percent locals and snowbirds, and 25 percent tourists. In fact, it’s about 80 percent tourists and 20 percent locals. The tourists have been great. They sometimes buy a stack of books and send them home. They ask for restaurant recommendations. And they’re always—always—thrilled to be in Key West. Of course we love our locals, too. So there’s a lot of chatting about books, Key West, and whatever else is on their minds. By the end of the day I’m exhausted (or did I say that already?). All I want is to eat dinner and go to bed.

TM: Do people freak out when they find out the lovely woman who just hand-sold them a novel is the beloved Judy Blume?

JB: Yesterday a couple came in and George and I were chatting with them about their used bookstore in another Florida city. George (that devil) asked if they carried Judy Blume books and before I could stop them from answering, always afraid they’ll say something like—I would never carry those books!—she said “Oh yes, a lot.” At which point I said, “I’m Judy”—and she was so taken aback I was worried she might faint. But all ended well. In the beginning, before there was so much publicity, people did freak out. Once I had to prove who I was by showing the customer my photo on the back of In the Unlikely Event. She studied it, studied me (I admit I was having a bad hair day and I’m often red-eyed and itchy nosed from something—the books, the dust, the building? It was clear she didn’t believe me and I was sorry I’d gotten into the conversation in the first place. Now, people come in because they’ve heard it’s my store. The trolleys, the tour buses, the concierges at the hotels, all let them know about Books & Books @ the Studios. And we’re grateful. George and I joke that I’m the Southernmost (everything in Key West is the “southernmost”) Shamu. You know, have your photo taken with Shamu (remember the whale, the one time star of Sea World?) Because we’re a non-profit, I don’t do photos unless the customer is actually buying something. It doesn’t have to be my book but it has to be something. People have been very understanding. Still, it embarrasses me to have to tell a customer our rules.

TM: What’s the best kind of bookstore customer?

JB: Anyone who’s friendly, loves to read, and finds a book or three to buy. Or maybe it’s a young person who says she doesn’t like to read who leaves the store with her nose in a book.

TM: The worst?

JB: Let’s say the most challenging. That would be a customer who wants a certain book but can’t think of the title or the author’s name. The cover is blue, or has a spot of blue, or maybe the type is in blue. She/he will think it’s new, will remember seeing it on our table last week, but it could have been she/he has just read about it. We’ll go around together looking at all the places that book might be. Sometimes we’ll actually find it. Hallelujah!

TM: What book do you want to tell the world about right now?

JB: Right now it’s What to Do About the Solomons, by Bethany Ball, a first novel I loved. It’s funny, sexy, and original. I’m also talking up Edgar and Lucy, by Victor Lodato. Emily (one of our managers) and I both loved it. And, of course, my favorite book of the year, The Nix, by Nathan Hill. You don’t want to miss this debut novel. George agrees.

TM: Are there other staff who are also writers?

JB: George has published two non-fiction books, both based on historical crimes. He’s a big help when someone wants a non-fiction book on a certain subject. That’s because he’s a reader. It’s more important to have staff who know and love books than staff who writes them.

TM: One of the great things about a bricks-and-mortar store is not only the individualized book picks, but also the author events. What were some of the fun ones this year?

JB: We had our first big events between January and April this year. Jami Attenberg, Kay Redfield Jamison, Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt. We had kids’ authors Meg Cabot and Rachel Vail. Since summer is our slow season we won’t have any more events until next fall/winter.

TM: What’s a favorite bookstore—NOT YOUR OWN?

JB: We visit bookstores wherever we go these days. In Santa Fe we’re fans of Collected Works. But, of course, our absolute favorite is Books & Books in Coral Gables. And their food (they have a cafe) is scrumptious!